Much like the mid-western states, here in Arizona, we also have tornadoes…..but just in a much, much smaller size. We like to call them dust devils. Others may have their own names for them, such as whirlwinds or wind funnels. Just like tornadoes, dust devils are a weather phenomenon of a vertically column of rotating air. But unlike tornadoes, dust devils aren’t backed by a larger force such as a mesocyclone from a thunderstorm.

We took our girls out of school for a lunch date today and ran into about a half dozen of these things making their way through our small community here. One of them, which I was not able to catch on video, had roughly a 4 ft by 4 ft sized tumble weed caught in it and was getting tossed around in a thirty foot circle.

Arizona Tornadoes or Dust Devils

Dust devils are usually harmless, but imagine getting smacked across the face with a tumble weed! For those of you who have never felt a dried up tumble weed, let me explain it to you….ouch! Thousands of stickers!

I’ve seen dust devils toss trampolines, knock over basketball hoops, tear off shingles or metal roofing and on the lighter side, destroy perfectly good hair. Combined with the right amount of dust and debris, they’re some of the best free entertainment around and are pretty cool to watch.

So I recorded a video of a dust devil that looked to be around 500 to 600 feet high and somewhere in between 10 to 20 yards in width.